


Hair Today, John Tomorrow

by persnickett



Category: Live Free or Die Hard (2007)
Genre: Cold Hands, Community: sexy_right, M/M, New Year's Resolutions, New Years, bald guys
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-28
Updated: 2014-01-28
Packaged: 2018-01-10 09:16:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,750
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1157900
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/persnickett/pseuds/persnickett
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John's hands were still cold, and the first touch was like ice on the hot, sensitive flesh.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hair Today, John Tomorrow

Matt was honestly starting to think next year’s resolution should be ‘no more resolutions’.  
  
The last few had been filed firmly under Embarrassingly-Epic Fail, where Matt tried to leave them and not think about them too much. Too discouraging.  
  
There was the time he decided it might impress McClane if he joined the gym. The natural outcome was obviously that Matt pulled something, in a rather compromising region, doing something ridiculous like trying to keep up with his set of jumping-jacks. Of course, the massage treatment that followed ended up resulting in the first time he and John had had sex. So, silver lining there.  
  
Then there was last year’s misguided attempt at improving his health by giving up caffeine instead. He’d only succeeded in bringing on a series of withdrawal-induced migraines, and spending an inordinate portion of January moping around in bed. Which had obliged John with the opportunity to administer copious quantities of the only migraine cure known to actually work. Which was sex.  
  
So, okay. Pot of gold at the end of the recently-gay albeit blindingly painful rainbow, there.  
  
But still. As Matt looked around at stacks of cardboard boxes, liberally coated in asthma-inciting dust-mite fodder and piled high enough Indiana Jones could’ve used them to stash the Ark, he was starting to think the universe might be trying to tell him something.  
  
Oh sure, cleaning out the attic had seemed like a good idea at the time. It had been back around the time John had started complaining that he’d already given up his home office to all of Matt’s equipment, and he wasn’t about to let his den go too.  
  
It was also around the time the Warlock got a new welder’s mask and agreed to send Matt his old one. The reaction when John saw it had involved a lot of profanity, but in between the cursing Matt had picked out something about a fridge full of Red Bull, and eight kinds of video game consoles hooked up to the TV (there were actually only three), and welding together nuclear submarines or goddamn Godzilla-robots to take over the city or whatever the hell Matt did while John was out working not being part of the plan, and how he was going to have to start paying the insurance bills around here.  
  
Assuring John that welding was a skilled trade – one which Matt had zero training in – and pointing out the difference between welding and cutting torches hadn’t helped Matt’s case any. John had brought up the ONE time Matt’s soldering iron melted a hole through one of his Fogerty CD’s - jewel case, disc and all ( _so_ not a big deal, it was barely enough to set off the smoke alarm) - and Matt had retorted that this place was so practically Paleolithic the attic was probably jam-packed with asbestos anyway. …And this year’s resolution to clear himself out a new workshop space had been born.  
  
But that had been way back in November, when January had been a safe several months off Matt’s mental calendar. He took another look at his folly, stacked up in interminable columns and pillars of sagging, ancient cardboard. Then he held his breath and forced himself to step forward a little further into dust-mite heaven.  
  
The boxes seemed to be in no particular order, and it was like navigating a mine field. There were several that seemed to be just old car parts, and a bunch that were full of paper. Then, just when he started to think he was safe, Matt would come across a little velvet jewelry gift-box or an old water bill addressed to Mrs H. McClane.  
  
On the bright side, Holly’s wedding dress was a wrist-length, puffy-sleeved symphony of white-sequined, taffeta-ruffled nightmares. Matt set it aside gleefully, with plans to send it to Lucy with a note that he had found it carefully and lovingly preserved, and it was clearly a matter of great family importance that she wear it at her own supposedly-upcoming nuptials (she and Jim were being sort of cagey about setting a date).  
  
He might even send her the head-piece and fingerless lace gloves a few days later for good measure.  
  
By the time he got to a box marked ‘Lucy’, Matt’s endurance was starting to flag. His allergies had already taken him through a box and a half of Kleenex, and he hadn’t eaten since his morning bowl of Count Chocula, but this was too good to pass up. Matt blew the dust off the top, swiped his hand under his itching nose, and dived in. He could take a break right after this one. God knew he’d earned it.  
  
It was exactly what he would have expected; soccer trophy, abused-looking My Little Ponies. A single Barbie with mangled hair and the fingers of one hand missing. There were a couple of books too – _The Poetry of Keats_ , which looked like it had never been read – and a photo album.  
  
Matt hesitated. This was bound to be full of pictures of Holly. Holly with John. Looking happy and young and…well, female. But it also might have a shot or two of the mysterious Jack, or Lucy with a pixie cut or a bad perm. He bit his lip and plunged ahead.  
  
It didn’t disappoint. There was Lucy in an array of Halloween costumes including Arabian Princess, Pirate, and maybe Holly had left the costume shopping up to John that year, because for some reason, Hot Dog. Jack apparently had had a rat-tail.  
  
Matt flipped another page over, and there it was, the dreaded family portrait. Holly was sitting with the kids in her lap, all decked out in their Sunday best. She did look sort of happy and young, and definitely pretty female, but Matt didn’t spare her more than a glance because standing behind her, was John.  
  
John as Matt had never seen him. This John was wearing a sport coat. This John was smiling – not scowling, not smirking sarcastically, just smiling, broad and open. This John had hair.  
  
Matt’s fingers had moved to trace the image before he even realized he was imagining what John’s hair might have felt like to touch. It was a rich, brown colour, several shades lighter than Matt’s own, and it looked like a different texture, too. Coarser, stronger. Just like the rest of John.  
  
It changed the shape of his whole face, taking out the rounded curve of his head bald. Even his shoulders looked more squared off and blocky in that sport coat. Matt stared at the difference, at this stranger with John’s face; the fullness in the cheeks, the ruddy, youthful tone of the skin. It was a long time before he turned to the next page.  
  
Then there John was again, hoisting a toddler-aged Lucy up into the air while they both laughed with delight. This picture was taken from the side, and it revealed so much more.  
  
Everything was there, the foundations of what made John the man he was today. It was like looking at a McClane prototype. Matt could see the familiar meatiness in the slope of his chest, and the places where lifting Lucy up made the muscles in his upper arm flex and stand out. Even the hair on John’s arms had been darker and thicker then. Everything about this John seemed somehow warmer, inviting.  
  
Matt had always assumed McClane’s nose must have been broken a bunch of times, but John’s face in profile showed the slight hook in his nose and the funny little flat spot at the tip had been there a long time. And of course there was that smile again, uncharacteristically bright, the green eyes lit up and glowing with laughter.  
  
Matt’s fingers were absently tracing the line of John’s arm in the photograph again, when he abruptly realized he was getting hard while looking at Lucy’s freaking baby pictures.  
  
He snapped the album shut and threw it back into the box as fast as if it had spontaneously burst into flames. He’d done enough in the attic for one day.  
  
  


 

 

 

 

**

  
  
  
Matt went back to his office after lunch but he couldn’t seem to get any real work done. It was a relief a couple of distracted hours later, when he heard John’s step in the hall.  
  
He all too eagerly saved everything and powered down, and tried to look casual about sauntering out into the hallway.  
  
John had just got his boots unlaced, and was bent over the mat, setting them neatly in the corner. Matt leaned himself against the door frame, watched him straighten up and turn around.  
  
“Hey,” John acknowledged him, with a tired looking nod.  
  
“Hi,” he answered. Watching John bend over must have made his voice do something stupid because John gave him a quizzical look on his way past him to the hall cabinet.  
  
Matt followed on his heels, watched him unholster and check the safety, watched the way his hands moved and the careful way he laid the gun on the cabinet shelf and turned the lock.  
  
“What’s the matter with you?” John asked, looking at him with his brows lowered and laying his shield on top of the cabinet.  
  
“Nice to see you too,” Matt returned.  
  
They both knew it was McClane for ‘is something wrong?’, but it was Matt’s general policy not to let him get away without the McClane-to-human translation reminder.  
  
John’s lip curved up at the corner and he reached out to put a hand, frigid with the January air, around the back of Matt’s neck and pull him in for a chaste, chilly kiss.  
  
“Hi Honey, how was your day?” John amended, but it only came out half-way sarcastic. He turned to make his way back down the hall to the coat rack by the door.  
  
“Got a start on my New Year’s resolution,” Matt said, putting his hands into his pockets and following slowly after John again. That kiss was nice and all, but it hadn’t been nearly enough.  
  
“Oh, the attic. Oh yeah?” John replied. He turned around at the end of the hallway and started to shrug his coat off his broad shoulders.  
  
John had apparently always been solidly built, but now Matt could catalogue the subtle changes time had wrought. Now he knew John was rounder, and more barrel-chested, than before. He knew that under the layers of down-filled bomber jacket and flannel his physique had hardened, the muscles had more definition than they used to now that age meant he had to work harder at keeping them.  
  
“Yeah,” Matt answered, reaching out for the sides of the coat and tugging, before John could get his arms free.  
  
“What’s gotten into you?” John asked, but he came forward willingly, and his voice was pitched low and intimate already, the way he knew Matt liked.  
  
“With any luck, _you_ will.” Maybe the old John used to smile all the time, or maybe it was just for pictures. Matt knew this John, though, and he knew this John’s dry, mischievous smirks were pretty much reserved for him. “Did you know there’s a bunch of old photo albums up there?”  
  
Now when John smiled, the years had given it a knowing twinkle that used to make him think John could tell everything he was thinking. Ever since John caught on that everything Matt was thinking was pretty much filthy, pretty much the majority of the time, that little twinkle came off more like downright _naughty_. It made him squirm in a whole different kind of way.  
  
“Lots of pictures of you looking _young_ ,” Matt continued, straightening the coat. “And virile.” He let his hands wander over John’s chest, down his ribs. “Pictures of you with _hair_.”  
  
Matt slid his arms further in under the coat and around John’s waist. He leaned in for another cool kiss.  
  
“Sorry you missed out, kid,” John said gruffly, when the kiss broke. “They tell me I used to be not so bad to look at.”  
  
“I like this better.” Matt nipped possessively at his bottom lip, and drew out one hand to let his fingers play down the side of John’s head, curve around the shell of his ear.  
  
John raised a skeptical brow. The eyes, Matt supposed, hadn’t changed. They still glowed with a keenness that was uniquely John’s.  
  
“No, I do,” Matt insisted, honestly. “It’s…experienced. Manly. It’s…”  
  
Matt didn’t think he could explain it, how he was sometimes struck slightly stupid with the way everything about John seemed to shine; the glossy smooth dome of his scalp, the silvering of scruff over his temples and jaw. How the way John had gotten just the tiniest bit craggy and worn was a good thing, how it drew him in and turned him on and made him fantasize the wildest things about how each line and mark had come to be. It was mysterious and familiar at the same time. It was a journey and it was home. It was…  
  
  
“Mine,” Matt concluded, leaning close again so he could say it in John’s ear, hear the answering chuckle get lost somewhere in his hair as John nuzzled into him.  
  
Then he pressed his lips to the skin at John’s temple, let his tongue poke out a little maybe, ran it over the stark prickle of stubble where sideburns would have been once. He could taste the salt of John’s skin, the cold, metallic tang of outside air before John flinched away in surprise.  
  
“’D you just _lick_ me?”  
  
“Don’t pretend you don’t like it.” Matt grinned. He raised his fingers to slide them over the damp trail his mouth had left, and this time John’s eyes closed briefly at the touch.  
  
Apparently John _really_ liked it, because next he said “C’mere,” all abrupt and brusque, and he put a hand behind Matt’s neck again and yanked him forward into a hard, crushing kiss and right off balance, so that he had no choice but to trust his weight to the solid wall John’s body made in comparison to his own.  
  
For a moment the movement continued forward and Matt clutched wildly at John’s jacket, sure they were headed for the floor. But then John’s frame relaxed against him, slumped down and sort of curled itself around his own, and he realized John had put his own back to the wall. All the better to hold him spine-bendingly tight, without stumbling all over.  
  
He could feel where his hips landed firmly against John’s that he wasn’t the only one who had spent the conversation more than half aroused. But apparently they were done talking.  
  
Matt almost wanted to laugh, but it wasn’t exactly funny. It was a little crazy, but not funny. John was usually a passionate kisser, but this - it was like John wanted to eat him, like he couldn’t get close enough. He was still pulling at him, smashing their chests together, and pressing his mouth over Matt’s so tight it was almost hard to breathe.  
  
He couldn’t tell if that’s what was making him feel slightly dizzy, or if it was just John. Just a result of this overwhelming fervour he wasn’t sure he’d ever felt in their kisses before.  
  
He must have been breathing though, because at some point he heard himself moan. The little noise seemed to draw John up for a moment, as if afraid he might have hurt him in the bad kind of way. But Matt followed his mouth, chasing the kiss and keeping it intact, and John gave a huff of hot breath against his mouth and renewed his attack.  
  
His hands were getting in on the action now, one sliding up Matt’s back, the other going to work urgently on his fly. It was an awkward angle, and Matt tried to step back but John still held him tightly close, managing to get a hand into his jeans somehow anyway.  
  
Matt gasped. John’s hands were still cold, and the first touch was like ice on the hot, sensitive flesh. This time John did stop what he was doing, and let Matt pull back just enough to get a word out.  
  
“Cold,” Matt explained, with a little hysterical-sounding chuckle.  
  
“Want me to stop?” John’s voice was a close, low rumble. It always drove Matt crazy when John talked to him in bed, and this time Matt was already halfway there. He shook his head dumbly, trying to form a response.  
  
“No, please,” he managed. And then, when John still hesitated: “Please don’t stop.”  
  
John gave a short little half-chuckle himself and then went back to work. When the touch came again it was still cold enough to shock, making his breath catch sharply and his balls draw up tight.  
  
He knew the cold wouldn’t last long, but this wasn’t actually entirely bad. He was used to having John’s big warm palm wrapped around him, which always felt awesome, but this was just so _different_. The cold-against-heat gave the touch definition and contrast, he could feel each separate finger wrapped around his shaft, the icy-hot graze of John’s knuckles against his stomach at this ridiculously tight angle.  
  
The cold really didn’t last long though, and neither would Matt, not with John drawing at his lips and nipping at his tongue like that, one hand still furiously, and now heatedly, working his cock. Matt honestly didn’t know what he would do if John did stop now. His head was reeling, and he felt utterly lost.  
  
Through the fog of lust and overwhelming sensation, Matt could feel the hand on his back moving, sliding downward and catching under his waistband until his jeans came down around their ankles. This hand was still cold and Matt almost laughed with the surprise of it when John cupped his ass, but he was cut short by the one arctic finger stroking into the cleft.  
  
“Oh—“ Matt gasped, the rest of the ‘my God’ swallowed up by another hard kiss.  
  
The frosty fingertip brushing at his hole was just too much. Matt clutched desperately at the heavy layers of John’s clothes again; a disorganized plea for what, he didn’t know exactly – to hurry the fuck up, slow the hell down, definitely, definitely not to stop.  
  
Again and again John stroked him, and John’s hand would have warmed up soon but Matt wasn’t going to last that long. He gave one last shove, to serve as some kind of warning, but it was unsurprisingly useless.  
  
It didn’t make sense that it should make it better, when John’s only response was to yank him even closer up against him. There was just something about John like this, this same John McClane who could be such a riddle to figure out, just being forceful and clear about what he wanted. Wanting Matt all over him, knowing he was about to shoot all over the place - their clothes, John’s coat - and not giving a shit, wanting it just the same.  
  
His whole body felt flooded with _John_ , all of his senses drowning in him. Pressed against him in every conceivable place; the coppery, wintry smell of outside fading now to the warm, familiar scent of his skin; the taste of him against Matt’s tongue. Matt collapsed, helpless, against the soft flannel and hard plastic buttons of John’s shirt, holding on for dear life but letting John hold him up at the same time.  
  
He came so hard he couldn’t help wondering if he it was possible to die of it. His vision whited out and he couldn’t feel his hands, and he was pretty sure for a second he stopped breathing.  
  
“…Best resolution ever,” Matt panted, when he could make his mouth obey him again.  
  
He could feel John’s features move into a smile against his hair. “You say that every year.”  
  
“That’s because you inexplicably get better every year,” Matt replied. He tried to pick himself up off of John’s chest but ended up needing help. “It should be against the laws of physics,” he argued, finding his feet again. “Guys are supposed to lose their touch in the sack when they get old. Something unnatural is happening here. Is it some kind of dark magic voo-doo? Are you a government genetic modification experiment? Deal with the devil? Be honest.”  
  
“Can’t have you thinking I’m getting soft, can I?” John said, and there was that twinkle.  
  
Matt looked down at the obvious – and impressive – erection in John’s chinos, complete with a little dark spot of moisture Matt felt suddenly motivated to get acquainted with on an intimate level.  
  
“Doesn’t look soft to me,” he murmured, giving in to temptation and letting his hand settle over the bulge. “Wait.” Matt shook off the distraction and looked back up at John. “Was that the reason for all the…” he took his hand off John’s crotch to wave it around in a word-summoning gesture. “With the grabbing and the…like, mauling and all that? Not that I’m _complaining_...”  
  
He was post-coital, he couldn’t be expected to be eloquent.  
  
John just gave a shrug of a big, bomber-clad shoulder against the wall.  
  
“I can’t believe it.” Matt was frankly a little flabbergasted. And still post-coital. “This isn’t how it works. You’re the hero in this scenario. I’m the squeeing fangirl. We established roles the day we met,” he said. “No backsies.”  
  
Yup. Still post-coital.  
  
Matt put his hand to John’s cheek. He wanted to be able to say it, to explain that he could never think of John as an old man. He was older, sure, but that was part of it; his appeal, the history of him. That was the point. He would always be - always had been - John McClane.  
  
“You know you don’t have to prove anything to me, right?” That was a little better. It didn’t say everything, but John turned his face into Matt’s palm and put a gentle, calm kiss there. So maybe it said enough.  
  
“Get upstairs in thirty seconds, I’ll prove I can make you come again before I do,” John said. There was that twinkle again.  
  
“Best. Resolution. Ever.” Matt repeated, stepping right out of his jeans. He wasn’t going to need them.  
  
He pulled his shirt off over his head too, as he headed for the stairs. His mind was already turning over ideas for next year’s resolutions.  
  
Something along the lines of ‘make as many resolutions as humanly possible’ seemed like an excellent place to start.  
  
  


 

 

 

 

~

  
  
  
  
  
 

**Author's Note:**

> PS - and in case you're wondering whether the photo Matt found is the one you think it is...[yep](http://www.theshiznit.co.uk/media/News/2011/Oct/die-hard-5-john-mcclanes-son.jpg). :)


End file.
